The New Mommy and Daddy

Hi Guys!

I told you all yesterday that I'm still in search of a female Dally, and that I forwarded my deposit to another breeder. Well, I wanted to show you guys some great photos of the Mommy, Selia of Fiacre Dalmatians and Moses

This is a recent photo of Selia in her happy happy state - showing a bit of a belly. She is LUA and is also homozygous dominant. She's won many awards and is absolutely beautiful!

(photo credit: Fiacre Dalmatians Blog) 

And this is Moses, the daddy. 

(photo credit: Black Diamond Dals) 

He is a handsome liver spotted male. Both of the parents have CHIC health clearances (CERF, BAER, OFA, and Thyroid). All of the puppies will be LUA. 

I really hope that they have enough females with this litter! 

Of New Puppies, Bad news, and further excitement

Hi guys!

We just got the news yesterday that Abby's 5 Puppies were born on April 2nd! Abby, the mommy is doing great. Unfortunately for us, all five of the puppies are males. We were looking specifically for a female. We have several options:

1.  We can change our preference to a male instead of a female.  
2. We can get our deposit back. 
3. We can move our deposit to the next litter from Annie. 
4. We can forward our deposit to another breeder from the area. 

We have decided to see our options before we made a definitive decision. Our current breeder sent me some contact information for three different breeders that are relatively close to where I live, and she is in contact with. So, I emailed all three, expressing my interest. I got a very speedy reply from a breeder who is in Nevada - close to Reno.  AND just got off of the phone with her. She is absolutely lovely! They are expecting puppies in the beginning of May. We've changed our preference slightly - while we are still looking for a female, we are now opened to having a liver spotted girl. We have always said that it is the temperament that will be the determining factor. Selia, the mommy dog, usually has a litter size of about 5 - 7, so we're keeping our fingers crossed. 

This breeder in particular has a blog that she also updates every week. While we are still awaiting answers from the other two breeders, this breeder is just so very warm and welcoming and I was definitely very happy to hear how often she updates everyone on how the mom is doing. She might be the one that we get a puppy from, if she has enough females. 

So, it looks like we will be forwarding our deposit to another breeder.
It looks like we are going to have to do a little more waiting, but hopefully not too much waiting!

Puppy Update! 3/24

Hi guys! Here to provide some news.
We got an email from our breeders just last night. And there were photos!

This here is Abby, the mommy dog. 

The email read: 

 Due date is approximately 4/1.  She's not huge so not sure how many pups we will have but we will definitely let you know after the pups are born.

Hopefully we can fill all requests.  But if not, as I mentioned to you previously, Annie, also an LUA female, will be bred when she comes into season (most likely April or May).

Assuming a 4/1 delivery, the pups will be ready to leave for their new homes from 5/24 to 5/28.  Of course we will give you plenty of notice and set up pick up times.  Pups that are show/breeding quality will go to homes that plan to get involved in the show/breeding venue and of course we will work with you.  Balance of pups will go as wonderful, loving pet companions.

We'll be in touch soon.

Hopefully everything goes well, and we will be able to get a puppy with this pregnancy. This is so exciting! 

New tumblr!

Hey everyone! I made a new tumblr that I would be updating much more frequently with photos! It would be great if you guys could follow it.

It's dedicated to both Moose and Pidge.

Mooseandpidge.tumblr.com

Good News: Puppy Update!

I just emailed the breeder last night for an update about the pregnancy and turns out that everything is going swimmingly! The puppies are expected to be born around April 1! Which is, as you know 12 days away! Less than two weeks! I'm not sure how many puppies she's pregnant with, nor how many are males and females, but it's so very close! Just around the corner!

I can't believe it! We're going to be new mommies very soon, everyone! I'm so very excited. In other news, our redecorating and puppy prepping the house is going rather well.

Yesterday, my Duckie with a help from her dad moved out and donated a large hutch (that was in our room) as well as one of our couches (that was in our living room). We mounted the tv in our room up, and set up the puppy crate!

We're still working on rangling those pesky cords in. We'll end up moving the crate forward away from under the tv. But for now, that's where it will stay. As for our living room, everything opened up much more which is really nice.

I feel like I keep saying this but we are in the final stretches of perfecting everything. This week has been quite a whirlwind of events, and I've been hired as an after school library assistant at a high school as well as a cataloger at a historical society. I'm continuing work at my retail job for now, and am hoping to get a call back from another Library Assistant position. I'm going to be a very busy girl, but I want to make sure that we have that much more financial cushion should anything happen. 

Big news for me and for my girlfriend as well! She's going to her orientation today for her beauty school! She got a call last minute yesterday to see If she was still interested in starting this month - if not, she would have had to wait until May! So this is really great news! I am so proud of her and so excited that she gets to do something she loves. She says that she's very nervous because of how much she's invested into this school, but I hope she makes a lot of new friends and really enjoys herself! 

We're almost there! 

We're in the final stretch of preparation.

Hey everyone!

So I'm not sure if you remember, one of the last posts in July was what resulted in a game changer and stopped us from redecorating our house: The fact that it would cost A LOT of money to redo our backyard. And on top of that, turf was out of the question. So what ever are we going to do about our puppy going potty?

Well, thank goodness for the patio we have upstairs, because we went ahead and bought her a Porch Potty!

I read different articles about potty training your puppy and there seemed to be a problem with using potty pads indoors as it'll teach the dog to go inside. And we really wanted to eliminate that. We did get her some potty pads for the inside of her crate JUST in case. But we mainly wanted to focus on her going outside. So this was a perfect opportunity - since our backyard is, basically, not going to work out - we found something that was the next best thing.

So we will be on puppy potty duty almost every hour for the first couple of weeks and then we will work to ween her will train her to give us some kind of a queue. Needless to say, I am quite excited to start setting this up as well as her crate. 

I'm sure, as you guys all saw in the previous posts, we've set up some of the gates up so our cat will get used to having to use them. We're trying to make this process as painless for her as possible. We've set up very strict rules - Dogs aren't allowed on the bed or the couch. The guest room (soon to be our closet) is HER room and she has a tower in every single major room of our house. We're making sure that she doesn't feel like she's getting ALL of her territories confiscated. She has places to escape to. 

We're easing her into the process and we're trying very hard to set thing up prior to the puppy coming so that she will get used to the weird new things. 

I know, I know - this blog is rather dull and only someone like myself would get excited about the set up part, but like I said, we're in the final stretch - we've got a couple more months and the puppy will be ours!

Of Nautical Storms and Changes in the tides Pt.2

While we have a very long way to go - an arduous road to organization, we decided to give our upstairs a rest and do some really fun things, such as begin redecorating our living room! This of course is proving to be difficult....

In December, right around Christmastime, my girlfriend realized that there was a leak, which of course was warping our ceiling downstairs. We had to get that fixed, and what you would imagine to be a smooth sailing of recovery became a hellish ride of too many visits from the same people for not getting it right in the first time. Long story short - we've had a hole in our ceiling in our dining room since the beginning of January and it wasn't until yesterday that our leak was fixed. With this in mind, we've pretty much had everything shoved into the living room - which meant that we couldn't possibly take down anything from Christmas or clean anything from the holidays. That was until this past week where my girlfriend and I decided to say "forget it. We're moving everything back into the dining room and decorating" - we had gone shopping at home goods (which, by the way is my mothership now) and target to get some stuff to furnish our very very cold living room. It was all just piled up in our kitchen, because we had no place for it, but after a lot of consideration, we've managed to pull something together

We decided to go with a nautical theme to really brighten up our home. Using pastel and a lot of colours. 

Here's a look at our mantle where we've decided to add a touch of Disney with our Pin collection. 

And we've decided to get rid of all of the ash in our fireplace to decorate it with this beautiful piece here. 

We also even went and added some greenery by decorating Moose's new cat tree in the nautical theme!  This cat tower was $70 at Petsmart - on sale. Then, we went to Beverly's and bought some greenery, which we stapled onto the wood post. We also hot glued some nautical rope onto the post, and then glued some succulents, starfish and shells onto the rope and post itself. The red plant looked kind of like coral and so we tucked those into the greenery. (close up photos below)

So, instead of spending $600~$1000 on a cat tree that kind of sort of looks like a tree, 

We spent a little over $100 to make our own custom tree that goes with our decor. 

 Which, I think Moose is quite fond of... 

We needed to put a cat tree in our living room as a place for Moose to escape to when we have a puppy. 

Feel free to tell me what you think about this. We're thinking of getting rid of one of our bigger couches and replacing it with two armchairs instead. Just to open up the room more. We've got so much to do, and so little time!